by Roger Shattuck
"What I call the forbidden experiment is one that would reveal to us what human nature really is beneath the overlays of society and culture," writes Shattuck in this reexamination of the story of a "wild boy" found around 1800 in a French wilderness. (The story was the basis for the 1970 Truffaut film, The Wild Boy.) For Shattuck, a professor of French at the University of Virginia, this new version of how the boy became a responding, though never really "tame," adult is an opportunity to ponder questions about man, innocence and what culture does to a presumably guileless being. Along the way he surveys the libertarian intellectual climate of France at the period—one that formed many ideas we hold today. The wild boy resisted any return to culture and died at 40 in 1828 without ever learning human language or living on his own in society. But, Shattuck concludes, he "achieved greatness in the less recognized form of an ordinary or even lowly person who responds to exceptional circumstances in a way that exceeds our predictions and expectations." (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $10.95)
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